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This is the online presentation of a 125-day series of mini-profiles of famous and infamous Montanans. The series commemorates 125 years of publishing the Great Falls Tribune. The articles will appear on the Montana section front Mondays through Saturdays, and on the Sunday Life page on Sundays. Additions will appear here after appearing in the newspaper.

Literary critics and historians consider A.B. Guthrie, who coined Montana’s nickname “The Big Sky” with his novel of the same name, one of the most important fiction writers of the American West.

Born in Indiana, Guthrie arrived in Choteau with his parents at the age of 6 months in 1901.

As a boy fishing in the shadow of Ear Mountain, Guthrie developed a passion for the land and its history.

Guthrie rose to literary fame with “The Big Sky” in 1947.

The novel’s success allowed Guthrie to resign as executive editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Leader after 21 years with the paper.

Guthrie then set out to write what he described in a letter to the Tribune as “a series of novels about America’s westering, following the progression chronologically.” The resulting work, “The Way West,” won the Pulitzer in 1950.

Next he penned “These Thousand Hills,” “Arfive,” “The Last Valley” and “Fair Land, Fair Land,” among other works.

Although he wrote fiction, his works are acclaimed for their historical accuracy, dispelling what Guthrie once called the “gun and gallop” myth of the Old West.

Guthrie, who graduated from the University of Montana in 1923, traveled and worked various jobs before becoming a reporter on the Lexington Leader in 1926. In 1944, he became a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. He returned to Montana in 1953, living in Great Falls and Missoula before moving to a home west of Choteau.

An outspoken environmentalist with sympathy for the grizzly, he donated 80 acres to the Nature Conservancy’s Pine Butte Preserve a year before his death.

“Sometimes I think the ability to be outraged is all that keeps me alive,” he told the Tribune in 1991.

— Tribune staff

Ink portrait by Frances O'Brien, ca. 1940s. From the book "Fifty Years After The Big Sky". New perspectives on fiction and films of A.B. Guthrie by William E. Farr and William W. Bevis.

A.B. Guthrie once called himself one of the "lucky newspapermen," able to abandon the editor's toil and make a living writing fiction. He rose to literary fame with "The Big Sky" in 1947. His "The Way West" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Tribune file photo.

"Sometimes I think the ability to be outraged is all that keeps me alive."

Born: Jan. 13, 1901, in Bedford, Ind.

Died: April 26, 1991, at his home on the Rocky Mountain Front.

Sources: Tribune files; “Montana Almanac”; and interviews with Bill Farr of the Rocky Mountain Center for the West and Mary Sexton of Choteau.